Author: admin

Sports ain’t back. Talking with a fellow coach I learned that baseball intends to have youth tourneys by memorial day with some strange rules including no more than 3 in a dugout and the rest spread out along the 1st and 3rd baselines. What I wonder is this: when both teams have 9+, how are you maintaining the less than 10 rule? Regardless, I am about the football. I am about the youth game to some extent, but largely about the Giants. Are they going to be any good this year?

No.

Well, kind of. I’m expecting second in the NFC east with the possibility of a wildcard spot given the new expansion. I think if that happens the squad has a legit shot to go all the way. Why? Because they’re that team. Barely scrape past .500 and win the Super Bowl. Manning Style. Except we don’t have Manning. We have Danny Drops and a developing line behind which Saquon may run wild. I hope. I think the new offense will be built for that and that is a huge benefit. Of course, all of this is contingent on the return of football this fall… If it doesn’t return, how do we determine draft picks?

I am missing the coaching side of things, but I spend enough time coaching up the kids that I do not entirely worry about missed opportunities in youth sports. With the Spring season cancelled my mid kid only has one opportunity left to play youth sports and that is this summer at the California tourney. Only, is that going to happen? Should it? I am no longer so certain.

Some Thoughts:

1. Have I mentioned that I miss sports?
2. I also miss this weird little grindcore band called An*l C**t
3. It pleases me to get to write that name for the first time in over a decade.. nearly two.
4. Yep, it is a strange Wednesday indeed.
5. I’ve been crafting in a new world and I am extremely happy about my progress. I’ve been more mindful of the world and started by laying the foundation for a farm and securing the neighboring city. The farm ought to give me enough income to power up all of the villagers and expand the town to the size where I have a few options from each profession. Then I can work on getting the goods I need to accomplish the main goal: Build a kick ass castle.

Started a new Minecraft world and I am thoroughly enjoying the experience. Starting fresh can be a pain in the butt in any endeavor, largely due to what starting fresh actually means. In short, it means abandoning everything that came before it. This is true of story as much as of games. In Minecraft it can take an extremely long time to reach the point where you can pursue the endgame-esque scenarios. It can be even longer to find an end portal (128 possible fortresses in an unlimited world and most don’t have portals). For me it was just good times to dig down deep into a hole and find some Iron Ore. That’s all. Just an excersise in digging, and for the most part without the meditative quality of listening to a book as I did it. In truth, this was a truer meditation, because I give myself over to the digging with an empty mind. When I surfaced, I realized I want to build a truly epic castle and adjoining town.

So, Minecraft is going well and bringing me joy. Five days out from a pitch deadline I am on the cusp of my first story idea. I have to develop a few more over the next couple of days, but this first one has legs. At least, it has a character who has a solid backstory to stand on. Now the plot is not entirely there, but it will be.

Between Minecraft and Writing it is hard to even consider that I have so much more going on. There is the work life (all is well and quiet). There is being a dad (we bought Catan and… my Gosh). There is football. Well, there is not football. We play 11 man in the age of 10 people or less gathering. The best we can hope for is 5 on 5 flag for the foreseeable future. I suppose I’ve moved on in a real sense. I am at that point of believing that training the brood is more valuable than the game time they get in these youth clashes. I am looking forward to designing a regimen for the weekend.

That’s all. That is me on a Cinco De Mayo Tuesday fresh off a burrito and a smile.

At some point the wheels completely fell off. I’ve been puttering along, trying to maintain a semblance of order without resorting to lists. As I continued on I recognized, and ignored, a murder of tasks that just were not being handled. Now I find myself at that point of overwhelmedness where I recognize that all those little things in small but necessary areas of my life have piled up once again to the point of sadness and distraction. I blame Minecraft. I blame Clash Royale too. The moment the craft world fell apart via glitch I was able to reallocate those attention resources to other things. Given that I’ve stopped Clash as well, I found myself with an abundance of attention resources that wandered into the dangerous territory of ‘what really needs to get handled?”

As I quickly discovered, a lot needs to get handled and I don’t really want to have to deal with any of it. Now I am suffering a fatal error in my memory stack. I am caught between all of these responsibilities that fell into the active queue and a lack of creative energy. This is a toxic combination. Suddenly I am in worker bee mode six days out from a major creative deadline. Honestly, I haven’t a clue how to deal with the slog except to deal with the slog.

I need to open up the notebook, reattach the stickies to the board, and get down to the business of handling my business. It isn’t fun or sexy, but neither am I when my mind (and thus body) falls prey to the slog. I am clearly not built for the slog and it takes a heavy toll on my personage. I’ll make it through the next two days of slog and perhaps by wednesday be open to the creative arts. Also, I can rely on the fact that I have a partner who loves me and makes me feel like I can handle things. That helps a lot.

Anyhow, checklists begin again.

I took the weekend off from checking work emails and the sky fell. I have a great deal to repair come morning it seems. One should not take a 48+ hour reprieve come finals season. Especially not in the time of Covid. So, I know now that no matter how things were before this, I shall be remembered as that teacher who went completely dark. That student memory is a funny thing.

I’m drinking an Old Fashioned (wanted one for the last 3 days) and typing with my off finger because the injury I mentioned the other day is still problematic. I cannot say if it is old age or a legit injury. Let’s just say I am not one of those action movie folks who gets winged and then keeps going like it doesn’t matter. It matters. It also hurts.

No, I am not a whiny baby either. Quit asking.

Instead you ought to ask me about what makes me happy these days. Well it is a very short list led by cuddles. Past that it is playing games with the family, sticking my toes in the water, and Minecraft. At least it WAS Minecraft until the world I’ve completely thrown my back into was corrupted. I overreacted and deleted all prior worlds and now I am in a hard reboot phase. I’m looking for a good seed with at least a town I can work with to build my paradise.

Note: I did not mention writing. I am struggling again. I recently read a Stephen King story about that very struggle. It disturbed me. It also reminded me that the only way to love writing is to be writing, so I feel that I need to be doing more of that in the coming weeks.

In the coming weeks I need to be doing more of getting my head right and remembering my priorities, because that has certainly been a bit of a slog. I get the work done, but it is a boom or bust work mentality. Thankfully I have enough talent that the boom really works. However, I feel that talent draining out of me from the endless cycle that seems to permeate every aspect of my professional life.

Long story made short: I gotta get into a groove.

Playing football today I sprained a finger. It was actually fine for hours and now it hurts like hell, even after two ibuprofen. So i am hacking away at this keyboard with one hand and trying to ride the waves of pain coming from the other…

sprains do not normally feel like this. And typing rarely goes this slowly

Some Thoughts:

1. high strung kids are especially annoying. I am at the point where i am about to toss the majority of my cups and have already outlawed water bottles because of the fights this crap causes. One kid extolls that cups are too dirty and he can only use water bottles and only drink them cold and never replaces them.

Residual numbness on the right side of my body from sitting in one spot too long is a grim reminder that my body is not right. It is not in shape. It–I–am not healthy. I am trying more now than I have in a long time. I have a great deal to live for, even if there are moments of sadness when I forget such things. There is a lot on my mind these days. Primarily I am concerned with success and good living. I am concerned with my success and that of those around me in addition to good living.

I think part of the reason my marriage failed is because my ex didn’t really want to have any sort of career and I wanted her to. I did not want it for any sense of accomplishment or sense that I was married to a powerful woman or what variation of that theme she suspected. No, I just wanted to be able to feel like I was not the only one out there contributing to the life and the household. I did not fully appreciate or recognize the stuff she did at home, but even now I don’t feel it was enough. If you are a stay at home mom, then why are the kids in daycare? Beyond that, we just could not afford to live as we wanted on my salary alone. That was just a fact. There was some truth to her suspicions that I wanted more for her. I wanted her to feel happy and successful. However, I didn’t know what that meant to her and created my own assumptions, which were clearly wrong.

I bring this up because I am in a different space mentally. I’ve decided that I am far too invested in helping my kids determine their own success. I especially feel that way about the young lady I call my daughter, who reminds me of my ex in her unwillingness to move past what I see as a basic and largely benign existence. It has bugged me in the past, but it isn’t my life and doesn’t unnecessarily drain my life, so do you. I gotta find the mental energy to do me.

The same is true for the boys. They have goals, which may only be temporary but are their goals. I am working to support them. I intend to work in that manor to the extent that it doesn’t unnecessarily drain my life. Again, I gotta do me. I’m trying that now, perhaps for the first time in a long time.

It feels fulfilling.

This is a late night blog. I have a bit more energy behind it, because I’ve be playing with my kids for a few hours and really enjoying it. That is largely where the joy of the blog ends. See, I want to talk about God Friended Me. The show was cancelled after two seasons of following around the protagonist and trying to figure out who was behind this mysterious ‘God Account’ that offered him friend suggestions of people in desperate need. SPOILER ALERT

****

You never find out who is behind it.

*****

So, yeah, the show is trash.

Seriously, we spent two years looking for some sort of a closing. We wanted lasting satisfaction and we got bunk. That, dear readers, is Janky. One thing I did learn from the show is that a great deal can be structured around expected outcomes. If done well enough, the readers/viewers do not care that the outcome is expected. The entire romance industry is built on that simple truth. Here is another simple truth: I need to write a novel now. I have all the creativity in the world inside of me and I am doing diddly with it. Heck, even my minecraft stuff is rote. It isn’t as if I have forever. One day I won’t be around and I want to look back on my life as one of accomplishment, love, and joy. I need to do things differently and more immediately in order for that to be a reality.

I don’t want to end my life like that show, never knowing what is possible. I want to end it knowing I lived it and I pushed myself in every conceivable way. I want to know I did it for me and not to prove things to people who don’t actually matter. I’m not here to flex. I am here to grow and learn and produce and not a lot of those things are presently happening. They could and should be.

Some Thoughts:

1. 4.295 didn’t actually publish so I published it here just a few moments ago. Gotta hit publish twice. It is a wonky system.
2. I’m trying to promote two words. One is because I like the word: Janky. The other, bandwith, is a straight up useless corporate word and functioning in this semi-corp space has me wanting to use fake words and popularize them for my own satisfaction.

Every morning I begin my day with a game of Clash Royale and a brief tour of the internet. I mean very brief. I peruse the selections curated by Apple News and then run off to my common three or four sites in this order: NFL.com, Cnn.com, foxnews.com, reuters.com. Yes, I said fox. I gotta know what the crazy spin is from both sides before settling into the Reuters reality. Occasionally I’ll skip reuters when I realize the other two aren’t actually talking about anything, so likely nothing is going on. Still, the entire process has me thinking. Why am I doing all of that each day? What is the gain? Is there a loss as well? Could I be poisoning my mind?

I am being dramatic to an extent, but the concept of garbage in, garbage out is not lost on me as a writer. Instead of keying in on Locus or Sci-fi daily, I am reading a lot of junk… and a lot of football that tells me not much new. That is really all the internet has become to me; distractions. My news cycle is not much different than my kids scanning through Tik Tok, or Quora, or Snapchat “News”.

So, yeah, I’ve identified a critical human problem for myself. I have grown accustomed and in a sense addicted to this sad series of inputs that are based in simplicity and accessibility and little else. I’ve given myself over to the cheap and easy fix in stereotypical American fashion. I’ve got to be better than that.

Some Thoughts:

1. Scott Meyer’s latest entry in the Magic 2.0 series is very 4th wall. At one point his characters are having a conversation about concepts that are directly reflective of criticism of the last book. Without saying they are discussing the book they are clearly discussing what was said about the book. He goes one step further with the Villains (a thinly veiled caricature of Trump and his invisible puppeteer McConnell) to have one character straight up rant about the circumstances that led to why he wrote the book… Nice.

I watched Yesterday last night. It was decent. The fictional portrayal of Ed Sheeran by Ed Sheeran was less than compelling, and that was a big part of why I watched–to hear him sing. Anyway, this isn’t about the film but about a line in the film that struck a cord. The female lead, Elle, has a moment where she tells the male lead not to go back to teaching. She argues that teaching will sap all of his creativity. He will give that energy to his students and thus have none left for creation. That line was an uppercut. It floored me. I’d never realized until that moment how much creativity is lost on this compartmentalized existence I continue to choose as my life.

I refuse to bore the audience (or overshare) by revealing what I am tasked with on a daily basis. I won’t tell you how many balls I juggle other than to say enough that if a few drop it isn’t really going to stop the show. On the other hand I will note that I am not writing my novels at present or even my short stories. Those balls were dropped in service of other things. In other words, the line was prescient of my situation and I am thankful for the fresh awareness.

At some point in the very near future I need to decide who and what I want to be. I recognize that I’ve taken on far more than I should and the fact that I have that ability to do so should not mean that I actually do so. I gotta leave enough in the tank to be the writer I believe I was born to be. Much of my self doubt and inability to produce stems from not giving myself the time and space to produce. I was chatting with a writer the other day about this expectation that Covid Season would be writing season, but isn’t. We both lamented about the inability to produce at a higher rate and the stress of the situation limiting our ability to write. He does this full time and he is feeling it. I’m working and being pulled in a half dozen directions on top of feeling it. That tells me I have a really high ceiling for being a writer if I just sit down and unleash that creativity in the direction it was intended.

I believe it is time to put together a financial plan for doing just that.

The news sucks. And now some thoughts…

No, kidding. It does suck though. The polarization of the news is building to a fever pitch as each ‘side’ struggles to both rally their base and create the illusion their base is larger than it actually is. On the Fox side the site has simultaneously fired the only black people and focused in on creating the impression that Biden is a rapist. He isn’t. While there may be some validity to the sexual assault claim, the notion of penetration has been legally dispelled. I do believe he pushed up on this woman in an effort to get her to hook up though. Does that disqualify him? Let me put it this way: The party that is firmly behind the man who literally said, “Grab them by the pussy” is creating a stir because they believe Biden actually did.

Don’t get me started on the GoP. In short, they don’t care about facts. They just care that they win. Hopefully they wont. That is all… Except for…

Some Thoughts:

1. Amazon is about to premiere a series about a digital afterlife. Yeah, it is about that time. We are legit moving towards that post reality and I am feeling it.
2. Would I do it? I do not believe the uploaded version of self is actually self. I believe that it is only a copy of ‘you’ and the chemical memories you and I all hold within us constitute us. I worry about death–the absence of existence–but I don’t believe the uploaded me is actually going to be me. Unless the whole show is a simulation to begin with.
3. Dreama Walker does in fact do a good job as the starry-eyed sweet Indiana girl in Don’t Trust the B in Apt. 23.